Should We Fight the Culture War?

But retreat even now seems to me wrong. Robby George certainly thinks so. He insists that issues like same-sex marriage can still be contested in the public square and public arguments can still be made with some hope of success. (In this he’s joined by the irrepressible and irreplaceable Ryan T. Anderson, now the public face of the defense of marriage.)

In the Facebook exchange, he rejected the intellectual genealogy, but noted that the people who think America misdirected from the start are still his allies and comrades. But (this is my take) allies and comrades who’d left the front lines to read books in the library and argue causes and effects in the coffee shop. “My point is simply this,” Robby wrote,

If you are pro-life and pro-marriage (whatever you think about “the Enlightenment’s” responsibility for our current plight), get yourself into the fight. You are needed. Enough with the defeatism. Stand up for the child in the womb. Bear witness to marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife. Take the personal and professional risks that come with bearing witness. Meet the sacrifices it demands. No excuses.

More:

He was responding to two tendencies, I think: 1) that of some conservatives to retreat into analysis, and particularly historical genealogy, when faced with a cultural and political challenge; and 2) that of some of them to find the problem in a force that can’t be resisted, like the Enlightenment roots of the American founding, which justifies disengagement from a battle we can’t win. He calls this defeatism.

I’m not so hopeful as Robby. He has greater faith than I do in the American people and the force of public reason.

Of course I agree, but here’s the thing: I also entirely agree with David here:

And for a fourth, we can prepare the retreat at the same time we play for the win. Preparing the retreat is mainly doing what we ought to be doing already, but doing it better, pushed into action by the threat that we might not be able to do it at all. Each of us praying more, giving more, moving deeper into the Tradition, strengthening our parishes, making our families and our parishes into communities that draw the wounded, marginalized, and lost — this we can do while writing letters to congressmen, supporting the good guys running for office, marching in protests, posting Facebook messages, and speaking in public and with our friends for the unborn child and for marriage, and for all in need.

Read the whole thing. What David says in this final paragraph is exactly what I think we should be doing. I have to say this over and over, because people don’t want to believe it, but here’s what the Benedict Option is not:

1) a counsel to run for the hills and to build a fortress where the outside world cannot get in; or

2) advice to quit fighting entirely, and to abandon the battlefield

I believe that we cannot give up the fight, if only to delay the inevitable to give us time enough to prepare ourselves and our institutions for the long resistance. In oral arguments before the Supreme Court yesterday, the administration’s lawyer admitted that religious institutions may lose their tax-exempt status over same-sex marriage. We will all be Bob Jones University very soon. From the WaPo:

During oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito compared the case to that of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian university in South Carolina. The Supreme Court ruled in 1983 the school was not entitled to a tax-exempt status if it barred interracial marriage.

Here is an exchange between Alito and Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., arguing for the same-sex couples on behalf of the Obama administration.

Justice Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax­exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a 10 university or a college if it opposed same­-sex marriage?

General Verrilli: You know, ­­I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is­­ it is going to be an issue.

Many schools, charities, and other religious institutions operate on a very close budgetary margin. They will not survive this. For years now, whenever someone asks the pseudo-question, “How is gay marriage going to affect me?” (which they mean as a statement saying that it will not affect them at all), people like me have pointed to the loss of tax-exempt status for religious institutions as an inevitable consequence. The media have not wanted to look at this, because it doesn’t suit the narrative. But it is true. A professor who teaches in an Evangelical college told me the other day that none of his students can imagine how constitutionalized gay marriage might affect them — this, even though it stands to deeply damage, even close, some of the schools and institutions they care about. If homosexuality = race, though, how on earth are our institutions not Bob Jones University, under the law?

Anyway, we will be fighting this out for years in the courts, and it will be nasty, and expensive, but we have no choice. And we are likely to lose, but the delays will give the wiser among us time to construct new strategies and institutional arrangements that will allow for the continuation of a communal life of fidelity in this anti-Christian culture. I suggest tithing to the Becket Fund and the Alliance Defending Freedom. We need them more than ever.

But.

I think the Neuhausian idea that we orthodox Christians and other social conservatives can still turn this thing around is mistaken, and a real distraction from the non-legal, non-political work we need to be doing within our own families and communities. I know of no one more courageous in public life today around this issue than Ryan T. Anderson. He is bearing witness bravely, brilliantly, and with a generosity of spirit that you can’t help but admire. And it’s doing very little good. It’s doing very little good not because of any deficit of intellect, articulation, or charisma on Ryan’s behalf; it’s doing very little good because Americans today do not want to hear what he has to say. It does not make sense to them. Nota bene: I think Ryan is right, and people who think his argument depends on the authority of the Bible are people who either have not read it, or want to justify avoiding reading it (it’s What Is Marriage?, a short, concise book he wrote with Robby George and Sherif Girgis, making the natural law argument for traditional marriage).

It doesn’t matter. It’s all “bigotry” to the mob. I respect Robby George’s fighting spirit, but there are already people losing their livelihoods over this issue. I know public advocates whose homes and property have been attacked for their stances, and whose children have been harassed. A senior manager I know at a major corporation is a devout Catholic, and has so far tried to keep his head down when human resources comes around asking employees to declare themselves “allies” of LGBTs. If he’s backed into a corner, he will not deny his faith, which is what he thinks amounts to. He knows he will likely lose his job. He has a wife and a large family to support. “Enough with the defeatism” is easy advice to give from the position of a tenured faculty member, or from the position of an unmarried young man who works for a conservative Washington think tank, or from the position of a writer for a conservative magazine. It’s a lot harder advice to take when you are like my friend the senior manager, or any of the non-tenured faculty I’ve met in my recent travels who are deeply worried about the atmosphere on their campuses.

I hope those men and women will stand up and be counted if the time comes. Their voices are needed. I think it is unconscionable that any pastor, priests, or bishop of a church that does not accept homosexuality remains silent in the face of the threat facing the church collectively now. Now is the time to find your voice, because there are so many in your congregation(s) who stand to lose far more than you do by being identified as orthodox. I hope that every orthodox Christian — Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox — is now thinking hard about where the line is in their current job or position, and how silent they can be before violating their conscience. The day is coming, and coming soon, when you will have to choose.

For all that, I do not blame ordinary people, people who are not as privileged as Robby George, Ryan Anderson, and I, for not wanting to rush out and volunteer to die on every hill, especially when this is a cause we are going to lose in the short run. Because we are, not because our politics are ineffective, or we lack ardor, but because the battle is not ultimately one of political strategy or firm will; it’s one of ideas. Allow me to quote at length from a lecture Ken Myers delivered at Eastern University two years back. Ken e-mailed it to me yesterday, and I excerpt it with his permission:

In a 1995 interview Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger offered a distinctive vision of the Church as a counterculture for the common good:

Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the Church’s history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intensive struggle against evil and bring the good into the world — that let God in. . . . [I]f society in its totality is no longer a Christian environment, just as it was not in the first four or five centuries, the Church herself must form cells in which mutual support and a common journey, and thus the great vital milieu of the church in miniature, can be experienced and put into practice. . . . The Church of tomorrow . . . will be a Church of minority.

The “counter” in counterculture sounds, as I’ve suggested, a prophetically constructive note. It is a necessary note because of the disorder of the modern West, and I think any effort to define and embody a counterculture for the common good has to work to understand the nature of that disorder. In a chapter called “The redemption of society,” in his book The Desire of the Nations, moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan observes that many thinkers from diverse intellectual disciplines and philosophical or theological points of view have converged on a critique of “modernity.” They disagree about many finer points and some larger ones, but they all agree that the social and cultural phenomena of our times need to be understood as “part of a greater historical totality — one which they date variously, but always in centuries rather than in decades. What makes life in the late modern period different — its high level of technologisation, its sexual permissiveness, its voluntarisations of birth and death, its concept of politics as economic management — can all be traced back to seed-thoughts that were present at the beginning of the modern era, and are aspects of a necessitating web of mutual implication.” O’Donovan goes on to develop that metaphor of seed-thoughts, which he believes is essential to understanding our historical moment. The flowering of an idea, he writes, “comes when it assumes a structural role that determines what else may be thought.” The consequences of ideas take shape over centuries, and they structure social life and cultural experience through formal and informal institutions, and thereby create well-worn channels that guide our thinking and intuiting.

One theologian whose work in chronicling the genealogy of modernity has been a benefit to me and many others is the late Colin Gunton. In his book, The One, the Three, and the Many, Gunton examines the seed-thoughts that have resulted in patterns of disengagement and displacement in modern culture. Human beings are disengaged from Creation, Gunton argues, and God is displaced from His relationship with Creation by various philosophical assumptions and conclusions, and by the subsequent social, political, and economic institutions that grew from those seed-thoughts.

Later:

It would be nice to believe that our neighbors were receptive to conversations about the common good, and that they would then think better of us, and so be more receptive to the Gospel. But I think that, once our neighbors understood what Christians mean by the common good, they would be even less interested in conversing than if we talked about abortion or same-sex marriage. We would move from pitched battles over particular issues on to even more pitched battles about fundamental and entirely irreconcilable disagreements concerning which no practical compromise is possible. I applaud enthusiastically the introduction of the idea of the common good into the life of Christian witness. But I think we should be committed to it even when we discover that it doesn’t help evangelism or the public impression of theologically conservative Christians. If we are too preoccupied with superficial winsomeness — with being more winsome than I think Jesus was — we will be tempted to secularize and shrink our theory and practice concerning the common good.

Eagerly pursuing the common good is an essential calling for believers, but I have no reason to think it will help us be more well-liked. It may well, in fact, produce what Stanley Hauerwas calls the right kind of enemies. In his essay, “Preaching as though We Had Enemies,” Hauerwas says that making the right sort of enemies is the whole point of Christianity. In that essay, Hauerwas observes that “liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian.” This is assumed despite the promise of Jesus that in this world we will have tribulation. Most of us do not go to church, Hauerwas writes, “because we are seeking a safe haven from our enemies; we go to church to be assured we have no enemies.”

Actively, systematically, and consistently promoting the common good will produce enemies and possibly invite persecution in modern America because our society is deeply committed to the premise that we should share no goods in common other than the belief that there are no goods in common. The American understanding of freedom — an understanding shared by many professing Christians — was articulated by Supreme Court Justice Kennedy in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This so-called “mystery passage” has received a lot of mockery from conservatives of various stripes, but I think it is profoundly accurate statement of the flowering of a seed-thought central to the character of modern culture. This radical privatizing of all metaphysical commitment is not the tyrannical expression of an elitist court, but the precious conviction of a majority of Americans. This is a country where it’s not uncommon to hear someone say something like “I believe Jesus is Lord — but that’s just my personal opinion.” Sociologist Robert Wuthnow, in American Mythos, reports on a study he conducted in which 58% of the public agreed that “Christianity is the best way to understand God,” but only 25% said it was best for everybody.

The orthodoxy of all liberal democracies requires that religious convictions — or any beliefs that even appear religious — be segregated from private life. Religious convictions cannot be regarded as having public consequence. As John Milbank has noted, “in principle, a state can adopt any ideology it chooses, except a religious one.” And yet, a Christian understanding of human flourishing and the common good must be founded on the affirmation of our creation by God.

More:

Every person is called to pursue goods which transcend the person and his or her choices. Some Protestants will be more familiar with a statement with a similar thrust: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Maritain says that ignoring the supernatural ends of human personhood is a sin against the common good. But according to the structures of modernity that determine “what may be thought” (as Oliver O’Donovan put it), this is not an assertion one can make in public. This muzzling of metaphysical claims typical of liberal societies is why a commitment to the common good properly understood will put us in conflict with deeply held commitments of our neighbors, specifically why we will be seen as a great threat to their understanding of human liberty and dignity. By the standards of a nonmodern understanding (either Christian or pagan) of what is good for human beings as such, we must conclude and somehow bear witness to the fact that the conventional modern understanding of liberty and dignity and of the human is not good for the common good.

By making it clear that the common good cannot be reconciled with the modern understanding of freedom, a commitment to the common good raises the stakes of public disagreement and potentially escalates cultural conflict. One hopes that the commitment to the common good that is emerging among evangelicals will sustain enough love for our neighbors so that we can risk being hated for challenging them about this. There will be some non-Christians who could side with a Christian understanding as Maritain and many others put it forth. There are likely to be many more Christians — on Right and Left — who reject the historic Christian understanding of freedom and who will want to see the common good watered down to a utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number.” If that happens, evangelicals will continue the pattern recognized by Tocqueville by which expressions of American Christianity merely serve an essentially secular, civil religion.

More:

The most important way we can be a counterculture serving the common good is not through influencing government policies but through re-forming the moral and metaphysical imaginations of our contemporaries. One reason I insist that there never really was a culture war was because the same people who spent 30 years fighting to get more Republicans in office were embracing and nurturing a modern understanding of freedom within their own churches. I’m referring to the remarkable tendency to re-position the church as a consumer good, evident in such phrases as “market-driven church.” The acquiescence to the models of therapy and commodification by churches eager to retain market share has been criticized for its watering down of theology. But the greater damage has been the way that the spirit of church marketing and the careless acceptance of commercial paradigms for ministry have made it that much harder to confront the modern understanding of freedom as the unobstructed power of choice, and of dignity as rooted in complete autonomy. Not only does this cultural capitulation hamper efforts at discipleship; it makes it impossible for Christians to recognize how the commodification of culture — the market model applied to all of human experience — is a dehumanizing enemy of the common good. If individuals are encouraged to understand themselves as sovereign consumers regarding everything, any impediment to free choosing becomes intolerable. David Bentley Hart has written that “We have come to believe — more or less unreflectively — that the will necessarily becomes more free the more it is emancipated from whatever constraints it suffers.”

true freedom . . . is the realization of a complex nature in its proper good (that is, in both its natural and supernatural ends); it is the freedom of a thing to flourish, to become ever more fully what it is. An absolutely ‘negative liberty’ — the absence of any religious, cultural, or social restrictions upon the exercise of the will — may often seem desirable (at least for oneself) but ultimately offers only the ‘freedom’ of chaos, of formless potential. This is enough, admittedly, if one’s highest model of life is protoplasm; but if one suspects that, as rational beings, we are called to a somewhat more elevated moral existence than that, one must begin to ask which impulses within us should be suppressed, both by ourselves and by the cultural rules that we all must share.

Hart is instructing us here that since the common good serves the transcendent good beyond itself, since the common good nurtures true human flourishing, the recognition of limits and the acceptance of communal disciplines are necessary.

Hart connects the premodern understanding of freedom with the role of society in discipling, training, educating, and forming its members:

Precisely through accepting freely the constraints of a larger social and moral tradition and community, one gives shape to a character that can endure from moment to moment, rather than dissolving in each instant into whichever new inclination of appetite or curiosity rises up within one. One ceases to be governed by caprice, or to be the slave of one’s own liberty.

This understanding of freedom, however, requires not only the belief that we possess an actual nature, which must flourish to be free, but a belief in the transcendent Good towards which that nature is oriented. This Christians, Jews, and virtuous pagans have always understood: that which can endure in us is sustained by that which lies beyond us, in the eternity of its own plenitude. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which — in the deepest reaches of our souls — we ceaselessly yearn. And whatever separates us from that end — even if it be our own power of choice within us — is a form of bondage. We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well.

And so, Hart concludes,

a society is just precisely to the degree that it makes true freedom possible; to do this it must leave certain areas of moral existence to govern themselves, but it must also in many cases seek to defeat the most vicious aspects of fallen nature, and to aid as far as possible in the elevation in each soul of right reason over mere appetite and impulse — which necessarily involves denying certain persons the things they want most. A just social order, that is to say, would be one devoted to what might be called a “pedagogy of the Good,” and would recognize that there can be no simple partition between the polity of the soul and the polity of the people, and that there is in fact a reciprocal spiritual relation — a harmony — between them. When appetite seizes the reins of the soul or the city, it drives the chariot toward ruin; so it is the very art of sound governance to seek to perfect the intricate and delicate choreography of moral and legal custom that will best promote the sway of reverent reason in city and soul alike.

I would like to say “read the whole thing,” as usual, but this long lecture is not available online, as far as I know. But if you are interested in this critique of Christianity and culture, you absolutely must subscribe to Ken Myers’s Mars Hill Audio Journal, which is hands down the very best resource for helping intellectual Christians understand the nature of the times in which we live.

The problem I see is that for Neuhausian culture warriors like George, the problem is chiefly a political and legal one. Fine, but we keep losing those skirmishes. Withdrawing strategically from the battlefront is not the same as surrender. The battlefront goes from out there to in here — that is, to within the communities we need to focus on as we thicken our practices and tell our stories. There is work to be done, work of the sort that we really haven’t had to do. Going to coffeehouses and reading books to understand the lay of the land may be more important in the end than another appearance on afternoon cable news, or another speech, or lecture, what have you. There are a number of ways to fight the culture war. Fight, yes, absolutely — but not every warrior draws a sword.

OK, I’ve given you a lot to read. I’m going to be driving all day to Dallas. 7pm tonight at the Barnes & Noble over by North Park Mall. I’ll be there taking Dante.

UPDATE: And I should add that Christians have an additional challenge in fighting back: we have to do so without hating those who hate us. If we succumb to hatred for them, we lose the greater battle, and betray Christ, because even those who make of themselves our enemies are made in the image of God, and bear in some way the light of Christ. That is a hard teaching, but nobody said the Way would be easy.

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128 Responses to Should We Fight the Culture War?

You do realize that the Green Revolution (no, not democracy, pace Amartya Sen) is the reason India doesn’t have famines any more, right? India is still a horribly malnourished country (very little of which is the fault of modernity or the left, and most of which is the fault of ‘traditional’ patterns of land ownership, unsustainably high fertility rates, and some other things), but malnutrition is still not famine.

Every battle you choose to fight will come back to you in ways that were not anticipated.

Check out the religious freedom language being used in this challenge to a waiting period for abortion. She’s basing it on her deeply held religious belief and using language similar to the Hobby Lobby appeal for exemption to certain aspects of the ACA.

@Bobby:
Ugh. This is intemperate. I’m sorry. But you, friend, are on my last nerve. I should probably apologize for posting this, or better, just not. But FYI, this is how you make the rest of us feel when you conflate us with the “gays caused 9/11” nuts, people in these comments do this kind of thing constantly, and it’s not really helping. (And no, this isn’t me “loving my enemies.” This is me being a jerk because I’m really annoyed with you. I’ll try to love my enemy later.) So, here goes:

So the heavily Catholic and Orthodox traditionalist readership of this blog needs to repent because Evangelicals? Huh? What’s your encore? Are you going to be blaming ISIS and al-Qaeda on Shi’a Islam?

Maybe it would be different if you didn’t have a penchant for blaming us for natural disasters and terrorist attacks. But you have to understand, there’s a reason why you have no credibility in the public square: You squandered it all away.

Name ONE prominent American Catholic or Orthodox public figure who ever, ever blamed natural disasters and terrorist attacks on teh gayz. Please. Oh, and name some Orthodox Jews, too, because they have the same view of human sexuality we do. But whatever, we’re all theists, so we’re all personally responsible for Pat Robertson, right? Irish-American me gets to be responsible for the ravings of the Southern U.S. kinsmen of Ian Paisley, so maybe you can round up some Jews and hold them responsible for Nazi Neopaganism, since all us theists are all the same. Because it’s all theism. Whatever.
Like, as an SSM advocate you’re not personally responsible for Eight Maps or whoever hacked Memories Pizza’s website and put up a bunch of porn there, but somehow I as a Catholic owe you an apology for Westboro Baptist Church? What would you like next? Do I owe you an apology for Jack Chick’s “Death Cookie” comic about the Catholic Eucharist, in case it offended you for some reason? Because clearly we’re all just one big indistinguishable blob, right?

And the lies continue even now. Indiana’s RFRA law was nothing similar to any RFRA law that we have ever seen in this country. Yet the supporters of the law claimed that it was no different, even while they blogged to their supporters about the law’s novelty.

The other RFRA laws predated Hobby Lobby, which interpreted ambiguities in old RFRA language. The Indiana law codified the result of Hobby Lobby. Is the language distinct? Yes. Does the distinction make a difference? No: all the old RFRA’s will presumably be interpreted in light of Hobby Lobby from now on. The main problem with Indiana’s RFRA is that Indiana doesn’t have any statute on the books outlawing discrimination against gays in housing, non-ministerial employment, and all the other entirely non-religious areas where for pity’s sake of course gay people ought to have nondiscrimination protection. But most of the other states with RFRA’s don’t have those protections either. So, yeah, it’s a problem, but it’s not unique to Indiana. Now there are some subtleties here. Perhaps even deeper than “The Pope Is Not A Baptist.” I’ll wait.

Social conservatives conduct themselves like a spoiled child who’s shocked when the consequences of his misdeeds come home to roost.

Well, I personally conduct myself like someone who has been publicly sympathetic to the case for civil SSM since Andrew Sullivan’s TNR article, and argued publicly for it with my fellow Catholics for years now, but will still have to have my religion ground into the dirt for the rest of my life by insular secularists like you who lump me in with Fred Phelps, and think that it’s only right that his misdeeds come to roost on me because I’m one of Those People, and like, religion sucks, man, and they’re all the same anyway. Who’s the spoiled child again?

They seem to believe that they have some birthright to be able to make the rules for everyone else. And when that right seems to be slipping away, they lie, cheat, and steal to try to preserve it. And when they’re caught lying, cheating, and stealing, they threaten to take their toys and go home. I say, “Go!” The faster the better.

Yeah, y’know, Rod and I and the rest of us just lie, cheat, and steal constantly! And you’re not an insulting bigot AT ALL for saying we do, just because we’re trads! You just want SCOTUS to tell the rest of the country that it HAS to legalize SSM and abortion on demand—it’s not like you think you have a birthright to be able to make rules for everyone else! Because only liars would claim that the Bill of Rights (ratified, 1791) doesn’t codify rights to SSM and abortion. James Madison was all about abortion and SSM! He was totally familiar with all the arguments for it. Big Andrew Sullivan fan, that James Madison. Just put him in a time machine with a copy of TNR, and Jimmy was happy as a clam. You’d have to be a lying, cheating, thief to think otherwise!
Or maybe you’d be an Evangelical pseudo-historian like David Barton! He’s like, the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, right, that David Barton guy? Something like that. Some Christian thing, it’s all the same. I bet he wears a funny hat and a robe and a big beard, that crazy Christian, David Barton. They all do that, don’t they? Like how Muslims wear turbans and carry little daggers? Those Muslims and their turbans, amirite?

Of course, the reality is this: the self-appointed spokesmen for these movements never have as much support as they think they do.

Actually, you seem to be the one appointing spokesmen. Like how you made Pat Robertson into the pope.

I’ve talked to several people who attended the Q Conference. They remarked about the contrast between RD’s shrill alarmism and the thoughtful presentations of Julie Rodgers, Matthew Vines, and David Gushee.

“How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him.” Now, that David Gushee. Everybody at Park Slope Emerging Church just loves him. Park Slope is part of America. So America loves him. Q.E.D.

All left the conference convinced that the church needs to stop opposing civil SSM,

and that the church should strongly consider handling same-sex relationships on a case-by-case basis and step away from per se prohibitions.

Gee, you must have lots of weekly churchgoing Catholics and Orthodox in your sample group, there, Pauline Kael. Because those groups are totally in favor of sacramental SSM. It’s not like you just polled a bunch of UCC people and maybe Andrew Sullivan and a guy with a John Bosworth paperback and then overgeneralized.

A friend of mine attends an urban PCA (conservative Presbyterian) church. He mentioned that the church conducted a recent informal survey and found that nearly 70% of its members believed that there was nothing sinful about gay sex within the context of a committed relationship.

Wow, a mainline Protestant church is drifting toward approval of SSM? What’s next? Why, I bet if the Anglicans endorse contraception, the Catholics will rush to do the same thing within the year! It’s all the same. It’s like how ROCOR is trying to fund new missions with “blessings” from the Prayer of Jabez! First Protestants do it, and then the Catholics and Orthodox immediately adopt it. Never fails!
Why, look how quickly the Catholic Church rushed to canonize St. John Calvin and St. John Knox! Catholics totally follow the Presbyterian lead on everything. Y’know who really loves John Knox? F.C. Celtic fans, those wacky Catholics. They even have a song about John Knox.
*
Okay, now I’m done venting. Time for some SELF-mockery:

The self-styled traditionalists aren’t merely losing this battle in the public square. They’re losing it within their own churches as well. There won’t be a Benedict Option because there won’t be anyone left who wants to go, except for a bunch of cranky old white men.

False. There will also be cranky young white men with tweed jackets, pipes, and Chesterton paperbacks. #Schrutefacts

Annie, thanks, that’s a much more thoughtful critique of the left than I understood from your earlier comment. I think you may be pointing to an impossible ideal; in the world as we actually have it, we’re going to be choosing most of the time between imperfect compromises on the one hand, and rancid sellouts on the other. I am perhaps a little more sympathetic to the imperfect compromises than you are. Then again, and I don’t say this with any pride, I’m also prepared to settle for commercially produced pizzas.

~~~I would call any idea “esoteric” if a guy has to keep writing whole books in order to explain it. Non-esoteric ideas can be explained in a page or so.~~~

You’re confusing “complex” with “esoteric.” By this logic no philosopher, theologian, political scientist, etc., should ever need to write anything longer than a pamphlet. But then “Publius” wrote 85 articles. Does this mean The Federalist is esoteric?

~~Second, how many traditions a given idea “draws from” is not the measure of how esoteric it is.~~

No doubt. But there is a vast difference between compounding elements from various sources into a mishmash, and analyzing various traditions to determine what they may or may not hold in common.

~~~Third, even if the ordering principle DB Hart believes he’s identified were as easily understood as a traffic light, the contrast he draws — between that and antinomian anarchy — is overstated, perhaps even self-refuting. If in fact societies of all kinds, most of them not Christian and some not even theistic in Western terms, have managed to find and perhaps even converge upon workable principles of moral order, then apparently there’s a wide range of options available besides formless chaos and “protoplasm.”~~~

Which simply proves you don’t get what Hart (or Nietzsche or Dostoevsky or C.S. Lewis or Flannery O’Connor or E.M. Cioran or Thomas Ligotti) is saying: if there is no transcendent order of Being on which morality is based, then all there is, ultimately, is the ego, its desires, and the will to power. Morality is inherently arbitrary, because there remains nothing solid whereby to judge it other than preference.

This is not a specifically religious argument or even a theist one. Even those Founders who were Deists accepted this, else the Declaration’s opening paragraphs make no sense. And of course those atheists I mentioned (Nietzsche, Cioran, Ligotti) believe it from the other side, so to speak. This is precisely what Dostoevsky meant when he had Ivan K. say “If there is no God then everything is permitted.” This does NOT mean what atheists and agnostics take it to mean: that people who don’t believe in God can’t be moral. It means that without God morality ultimately and fundamentally doesn’t matter. You can talk forever and a day about “justice” and “fairness” and “consent,” but if they’re rooted in nothing beyond humanity they’re just words that can be discarded as soon as someone comes into power who doesn’t like them.

“I personally think what led to gay marriage was a population that wasn’t going to be bullied anymore standing up vociferously, coupled with the reality that almost everyone has someone they know who’s gay — often in family. It was inevitable in some respects. It’s personal.”

Chuck, your post was thoughtful and irenic, but you miss one very large fact, and one which SSM advocates seem to be completely blind to: the pro-gay movement has had on its side for 25+ years the media, the entertainment industry, and the vast majority of both academia and corporate America.

In other words, the 2% would have gotten NOWHERE without the 1%.

Now the Old Left would have found this troubling (Lasch! Thou shouldst be living at this hour…), but since for today’s progressive Left ends always justify means, and morality is what serves the Revolution, this bizarre (from one angle) alliance is not problematic at all.

This is why I think that, yes, we should fight the culture war, but that debate is somewhat useless as a weapon. There is no real common ground on which to stand; it’s like both sides have a stick and a ball, but one side wants to play billiards while the other wants to play baseball. Both sides have a round object and a cylindrical piece of wood with which to strike it, but the common ground stops there.

Erin, phenomenal writing. The sexual revolution as McMansion or GMO – terrific imagery. Hector, the green revolution is unsustainable and devastating to local cultures. It has put off the reckoning which will now be even worse, and sent millions to the cities to avoid famine by living off garbage.

Annie wrote: “Modernity did not rid us of slavery: it outsourced it. Our middle-class lifestyle is not based upon true wealth, and the poisonous, unsustainable luxury we ‘enjoy’ is based upon the crimes we allow others to commit in the name of profit. The dictators of the past at least didn’t outsource their crimes and pretend they had established Utopia.”

It was so much better for all those places to which jobs are now outsourced when they were colonies of Europe’s Christian nations. At least back then the exploitation didn’t raise wages and create expectations. And no popular media either!!!!

I’m quite confident that as a prudential, pragmatic matter, this Catholic embrace of religious liberty will remain strong….

Well, yes, I agree–but “prudential” and “pragmatic” point toward what you later make explicit; that is, that in principle killing heretics is still A-OK, and could hypothetically return under certain circumstances.

Dignitatis humanae neither could have nor did repeal either the Church’s teaching that it may in justice temporally punish heresy, nor its teaching that the Church may obtain the aid of the secular arm in so doing.

There’s the crux. I think the bolded part is morally wrong, and despite its frequent assertion by the Western (less so by the Eastern–I don’t have enough background on that history to say) Church, I strongly disagree with it and do not consider it infallible.

Now, this seems to me to be an unavoidable problem in Christian theology.

You’re doggone right there!

And God is owed, as a matter of basic justice, worship from his rational creatures…because we owe the duty. So not to worship God aright is sin. And sin, as noted above, is widely held to be a just subject of even severe punishment. So heresy (and of course sodomy and all the rest, which are sins against God in their own various ways) is sin, and sin is justly punished.

See, the thing about us owing worship to God is to me another example of Roman hyper-legalism that you see so much, alas, in Catholic theology. God is worthy of worship, sure; and we ought to worship Him, yes; but to frame it in legalistic terms according to which it is theoretically punishable by the state is a horrible mistake, IMO. I mean, you see a reflection of this in the old-fashioned idea that a man can punish his wife–corporally, if necessary–for not “submitting” to him and performing her wifely duties (not just sexual) correctly. In a sense, she “sins” against him. Ditto the relationship between parents and children, masters and slaves, etc. God is a paradigm for His creatures, and a moral exemplar. If it’s OK for Him to punish sins against Himself as a matter of justice, to order genocide, etc., it’s going to look permissible for us. As Nietzsche said, “One is most dishonest about one’s God–He is not permitted to sin!” Thus, either we may emulate the nasty things attributed to God; or if we think He seems to be acting like a bloodthirsty tyrant, then maybe we need to rethink a lot of things about Him.

None of that teaching is going anywhere. Neither are Biblical stories like those of Phineas, who won God’s favor by publicly slaying an Israelite and his new bride from among the surrounding, idolatrous peoples.

Well, that’s a perfect example of the type of stories from the OT that strike me as borderline demonic. I’m sorry, but I don’t accept those as in any way, shape, or form OK, let alone paradigmatic. I won’t go into it here, but I talk at length about it in the series about the Bible on my blog.

I’ll have to check out Alexander’s writing. I’m actually often more in sympathy with this kind of thing from atheists than I am with attempts to defend such stuff from my own co-religionists. Like you, I’m a “reformed Nazi”. Personally, I hope that eventually the Church will get around to fully repudiating such views as discussed above. I doubt it; because since the Church is committed to the (IMO erroneous view) that doctrine never can change and never has changed, it never directly repudiates past teaching. Rather, as Ross Douthat nicely explains here:

Indeed, many liberal Catholics would say that’s how the Church always changes. A teaching or an idea (the prohibition against usury, say, or the theological speculation that unbaptized infants who die go to Limbo) gradually becomes vestigial: Catholics ignore it and churchmen stop talking about it, and then eventually the hierarchy comes up with some official-sounding explanation (one that starts, “As the Church has always taught …”) for why it’s no longer really in force. The rest of Catholic teaching holds together just fine during this transition; there’s no danger of a Jenga effect, no thread-pulling that ends up unraveling the whole.

I hope that’s what happens with traditional views on religious freedom and the right of the Church, at least in principle, to suppress it and to punish heresy, etc.

[T]he bacillus of persecution still lies dormant in my communion, perhaps just waiting for the right climate to inflict the world of Handmaid’s Tale on everybody.

That’s what bothers me, and I admire your honesty in noting it. Some of the “popes and persecutors” of whom you speak did have good, even excellent and holy qualities. Thing is, though, I think persecution is indeed a bacillus, not part of the DNA of the Church. DNA persists, is part of the organism. Bacilli are treated with antibiotics–that is, we get rid of them.

The Catholic cannot say, if the integrity of the historical Magisterium is to be respected in its consistency, that such persecution is intrinsically wrong, in principle.

Well, that’s it. I’d take a far narrower view of just what is entailed in “the integrity of the historical Magisterium”, as does the Magisterium itself, when it suits it to do so (see the Douthat quote above). Bottom line: Such things as we’re discussing here manifest themselves right now. I applaud your scolding of dominic1955 a few threads back for his suggestion that whole classes of people ought to be involuntarily sterilized and “mowed down” (and his weak preface, “I know it’s sinful, but…” hardly mitigates this at all). The thing is, given his presuppositions, there’s a certain logic to what he says. Once you go down the road of accepting that oppression and violence in the name of religion is OK in principle, you tend to get mission creep; and that mission creep sooner or later gets defended as fine and dandy itself.

For theists, some form of St. Paul’s observation in Romans that the Potter may in justice do what He likes with the clay He shapes cannot be disowned.

I actually make some attempts to disown it , , and . Money quote from the first linked essay:

God is the potter, we are the pots, and He can do any damn thing He wants to the pots, who have no right to complain, period. In our analogy, He owes the characters in the story nothing, and can write them as He pleases, and they have no right to complain. I have to be honest here and say that I have a deep loathing for these passages, but they tend to be the go-to quotes used to “justify the ways of God to man,” as Milton put it. In the strict sense, this is true–God is omnipotent and sovereign–but I reject this in the crudely literal and simplistic sense in which it’s generally used, that is, that we should accept whatever God dishes out passively and not even think about getting upset about it or questioning God’s goodness.

And from the third:

A related point is raised by C. S. Lewis: “if good is to be defined as what God commands [and this is implicit in the potter/pot analogy], then the goodness of God Himself is emptied of meaning and the commands of an omnipotent fiend would have the same claim on us as those of the ‘righteous Lord.’” Or again Leibniz: “this opinion would hardly distinguish God from the devil.” That is, since divine command theory trivializes God’s goodness, it is incapable of explaining the difference between God and an all-powerful demon.

If so, it behooves us Catholics in this century to remember and record the brutal, blood-soaked, and flabbergastingly counterproductive persecutions of heretics, Jews, Muslims, gay people, and others over the century, and to argue vociferously that while, yes, to be sure, God has the right to punish, His Incarnate example is of refraining from exercising that right. The Bible is the word of God, but Christ is His Incarnate Word itself, the exegetical key to every verse of Scripture, and certainly to every document of the Tradition.

Well, I’d agree with this.

That’s a long answer. And not a reassuring one. But it is at least an honest one.

Very true, and I appreciate it and give you kudos for it. We disagree about the underlying philosophy/theology; but I think we agree about how Christians should manifest their beliefs in the world.

Irenist, I frankly don’t know to what degree the Constitution creates a right to SSM, but if it does do so, it wasn’t James Madison who did it, it was the framers of the 14th Amendment in the late 1860s. Granted, they weren’t consciously thinking of SSM either. Nonetheless there’s an originalist argument for marriage equality on 14th Amendment grounds. The framers did consciously intend to (a) overrule the states on questions concerning individual rights, clarifying that federal rights belong to “all persons” regardless of state residency; (b) extend the “equal protection of the laws” nationwide, meaning any and all laws, including those not yet passed, which by definition includes laws they weren’t consciously thinking about at the time; and (c) in so doing, prevent the states from creating invidious distinctions between first- and second-class citizens. So the argument would be that marriage laws are included among laws that must be interpreted as protecting people equally, and that failing to read them that way unconstitutionally stigmatizes gays and lesbians as some kind of lesser group.

Whether that’s right or not, it would not obviously be inconsistent with the intentions of the amendment’s framers. Granted, it takes time for the recognition to take hold that a certain way of dividing people is invidious, which is why the marriage laws in place in the 1860s weren’t instantly revised when the amendment was ratified. But we’ve known all along that the amendment’s meaning for a given issue may be discovered only belatedly. That’s what happened with segregation, which virtually every judge in the country today would agree is contrary to the 14th Amendment — is exactly the kind of thing it was meant to outlaw. And yet this realization did not hit home until the 1950s.

I should probably clarify that my last comment described an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that some would deny is “originalism” and that others would say is a good interpretation, but one that shows why originalism is wrong. In other words, you could define “original intent” as meaning “specific social consequences that were present to the minds of the framers and that they actively wished to bring about.” I am disagreeing with that, though; I think they were well aware that they could not foresee every possible future application of the amendment, and that their original intent was precisely to set down a broad rule with the broad goal of destroying caste systems in whatever form they might one day be recognized as having come into being.

Rob G, we’re not going to agree on this, but I appreciate your further response and do take seriously the issue you’re addressing. I’m sure you know all the following and I don’t mean to insult your intelligence with it, but offer it for the benefit of any other readers here who might be new to these questions:

…..if there is no transcendent order of Being on which morality is based, then all there is, ultimately, is the ego, its desires, and the will to power. Morality is inherently arbitrary, because there remains nothing solid whereby to judge it other than preference. … You can talk forever and a day about “justice” and “fairness” and “consent,” but if they’re rooted in nothing beyond humanity they’re just words that can be discarded as soon as someone comes into power who doesn’t like them.

I’m not an atheist, but I suppose I am a secularist, meaning that I reject that analysis — for these reasons:

1. I don’t think that “all there is” is the ego and its desires, etc. I think we also have reason and the ability to study and learn from historical experience. Plus, some of our desires are not just chaotically egoistical, but instead move us to want to cooperate and live in ordered and settled communities, which means we have incentives to try to find accommodations and compromises. And for the most part of have done so, which is why civilization has persisted for 5,000+ years despite many struggles and upsets.

You mention The Federalist. It’s a good example of what I’m talking about: reasoned arguments, referencing historical examples, about how best to design a system that will allow people of diverse backgrounds and views to work together in the same large community. Note that it doesn’t rely on any alleged revelation from God.

2. Religious faith doesn’t give you “anything solid” to base morality on either. It’s faith, not certainty. Even if it’s focused on something real — and nobody knows if that’s really the case — that reality is at best seen “as through a glass, darkly.” As soon as someone comes along who rejects your particular concept of God, or doesn’t believe you actually spoke to an angel in that vision you had, or says he’s found some entirely new sacred book written on golden plates buried in the ground, or [fill in a hundred other variants here], all that you thought was solid melts into air, to coin a phrase.

3. Likewise, the articulation of your faith, and its moral implications, are also “just words.” Even if they were written down 2,000+ years ago, they’re just words. You believe the words point to something greater; other people don’t. And so really, in the end, you’re thrown back on the factors I mentioned under point #1: people’s ability and willingness to reason together despite their differences because they prefer civilized life over the Hobbesian state of nature.

In sum, I think the urge to have some absolute grounding for morality is a case of making the best the enemy of the good. It might be a nice thing, but we’ve never really had it, which perhaps is why David Bentley Hart is spending his days in search of the points of agreement underlying very diverse traditions. The problem is that even if he’s found those, the devil (as they say) is in the details, so it won’t make for agreement about the moral rules or implications to be drawn from them. Nonetheless, we’ve generally found ways and means of adjusting our differences and getting along for most practical purposes. I’m reminded of the recent thread on quantum mechanics: We don’t have an “absolute” understanding even of how matter is held together, and yet I can go about my day confidently making all kinds of workable predictions (which others will share) about how objects behave and how cause and effect will work. I don’t need a final theory of physical reality to know that it’s best if I stay in my own lane while driving; I just need to know that there are conventional rules about that, which the drivers of oncoming cars are likely to be following as well. That’s good enough.

You can talk forever and a day about “justice” and “fairness” and “consent,” but if they’re rooted in nothing beyond humanity they’re just words that can be discarded as soon as someone comes into power who doesn’t like them.

Hang on a second there…

Even if justice, fairness, and consent ARE rooted in God, what’s to prevent them from being discarded as soon as someone comes into power who doesn’t like them?

The other RFRA laws predated Hobby Lobby, which interpreted ambiguities in old RFRA language. The Indiana law codified the result of Hobby Lobby. Is the language distinct? Yes. Does the distinction make a difference? No: all the old RFRA’s will presumably be interpreted in light of Hobby Lobby from now on.

So, it was the same because it was different in ways it no longer had to be different…

Seriously, just say were “spinning”. After all, political lying isn’t really lying. Because what you’re doing instead of admitting they were lying is humiliating yourself.

Irenist–Wonderful comments. The only nugget I would add is to point out that a lot of the original Decretalists (and some Popes) were trained in Roman law and that’s where a lot of Canon law came from. Heresy law was swiped wholesale from Roman treason law, and because the authority in question was God, the most severe form of the law was grabbed (Roman law had gradations of treason law.) Which is one reason why accusations of treason wrecked property rights all over Europe….the consensus was something like you could bring post-mortem accusations of heresy for up to 40 years after death.

John_E has neatly debunked reliance on God as a panacea for Meaningful Words and Good Government, or even Wholesome Culture. C.S. Lewis said something similar, about being Christian to promote social justice, or good behavior, or any reason whatsoever, except that it is true.

I hope Rob G retains enough interest in this post to check for replies and respond to mine.

I know I often drop conversations when the post goes to page 2.

But, seriously, if someone doesn’t think justice, fairness, and consent are – in and of themselves – useful building blocks of civilization, then why on earth would it be reasonable to think that such a person would take any notice of the claim that those concepts are rooted in God?

“some of our desires are not just chaotically egoistical, but instead move us to want to cooperate and live in ordered and settled communities, which means we have incentives to try to find accommodations and compromises. And for the most part of have done so, which is why civilization has persisted for 5,000+ years despite many struggles and upsets.”

Yes, but for the vast majority of that time and for the vast majority of cultures there was a belief in the transcendent, from which people drew on in their quest for those compromises and accommodations. C.S. Lewis referred to this cross-chronological, cross-cultural commonality as The Tao.

But if there is ultimately no standard like The Tao, then all these efforts were simply exercises in preference. And if that’s the case, why is the strongman’s preference to dominate and hoard any less valid than the majority’s preference to live freely and without want? Where can you stand to judge Stalin over against Gandhi, if there’s nothing above them both on which to base that judgment?

“You mention The Federalist. It’s a good example of what I’m talking about: reasoned arguments, referencing historical examples, about how best to design a system that will allow people of diverse backgrounds and views to work together in the same large community. Note that it doesn’t rely on any alleged revelation from God.”

True, but given what was written in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration, and the fact that the Founders were almost all either Deists or Christians of some sort, it would seem that they accepted the idea of a transcendent order of Being even if they did not all agree on what it was. Given the beliefs of the vast majority of the people at that time who would have been reading The Federalist, common ground would have been assumed, and no necessity would have been seen to reassert it.

Well, it’s not “certainty” in a scientific, clinical sense, but let’s not be positivists here. In that regard there is no certainty of that sort the other way either. Both views require faith, because the basic presuppositions of both are fundamentally unprovable. Still, if anything is proven by science it’s that matter inherently involves change. How then can anything “solid” arise out of perpetual change? The person who believes in a God, or a transcendent order of being, believes in something that is ultimately UNchanging, thus solid. Now he may be wrong, but at least the possibility for solidity is there.

~~~Likewise, the articulation of your faith, and its moral implications, are also “just words.” Even if they were written down 2,000+ years ago, they’re just words. You believe the words point to something greater; other people don’t.~~~

But you see, I’m not talking about my particular faith. I’m talking about words inherently pointing to something beyond themselves, call it what you may. In the materialist schema, as described as I did above, you’ve got nothing whereby to judge the definitions of words as either good or bad. WHY is “fairness” better than “injustice”? The former may help us get along better, but why is that necessarily good? If the strongman sees profit for himself and his people in fostering unfairness and injustice, to whom do you appeal? You can claim “fairness,” “peace,” “justice,” what have you, but if the words have no root in Being, you might as well say, “fungus,” “pizza,” and “jaundice,” because there’s no claim you can make against the strongman based on words that in reality rise no farther than the ceiling.

Re: “I should add that Christians have an additional challenge in fighting back: we have to do so without hating those who hate us.”

Rod, we do NOT “hate” you. We hate the things PLY (people like you) say about God’s LGBTQ children – like that our relationships are the same thing as “rape”, “murder”, “child-molestation”, “bestiality”, “necrophilia”, and “worse than terrorism”. And like Erin Manning’s ever-uncharitable “roomies shackin’ up”, and “marryin’ a plant/rock/bicycle”.

These (culled from ‘religious’/’christian’ websites) are perceived as hateful things, because they are devised to demean, diminish, debase and, yes, dehumanize gay people.

[NFR: No, you hate us. I get that, even if you don’t. That’s cool; I just need to make sure that we’re seeing things as they are, not as we would like them to be. — RD]

Rob G, if you’re still reading this, I doubt that there’s any ultimate metaphysical reason why strongman rule is better or worse. There doesn’t need to be. Our historical experience in the West is pretty clear: over the course of centuries, strongmen of various kinds — emperors, lords, kings, popes, dictators — eventually gave way to various approximations of democracy. It seems that’s because in the long run, strongmen can’t satisfy a large enough proportion of the people to stay in power. They also have a greater tendency to go to war with each other. These problems make their rule unstable; eventually, revolutionary pressures build up and things have to change. So far (knock wood), democracy, with its mechanisms of accountability and inclusion, seems less vulnerable to these tendencies.

As to The Federalist, my point was that there is no appeal to any faith-based claim in order to prove any given point; it’s all historical examples and secular reasoning. The phrase “Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration strikes me as a kind of ritualistic bow to the Almighty, like a prayer before a football game that will actually be played according to entirely human rules. It’s interesting, if not dispositive, that the drafter of the Declaration was Jefferson, who later busied himself excising all references to the supernatural and Jesus’ divinity out of the Gospels because he thought those features interfered with the Gospels’ real message.

Citizen George, you’ve offered a potpourri of commentary that is almost impossible to render a single verdict on.

But I think the reason Rod affirms “no, you hate us,” is that from the broadside you’ve put together, you hate even the possibility that some member of some Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other sect might believe that people who “feel” same-sex attraction should refuse to ACT on that “feeling” because it is not what God calls us to.

That teaching may be correct, it may be a lot of made-up b.s., but if you are not willing to accept that it is as valid as saying it is wrong to eat pork, dog, raw oysters, crabs, lobsters, to drink alcohol, etc. etc. etc., then ultimately, Rod has every ground to insist “No, you hate us.”

Incidentally, ever read any propaganda from the pampered American liberal who wanted to raise a world wide crusade against the fact that Koreans and Thais and Vietnamese eat dog meat? We all have to accept that some people in the world believe and act in ways that we personally don’t appreciate.

If you’re remaining concern is, “But if I don’t believe that, I shouldn’t be prevented from finding true love with another man,” I agree. You may be endangering your immortal soul or you may be fulfilling God’s plan for your life, but that is between you and God, and your partner. If someone who feels gay wants to listen to Erin, and Bernie, and Rod, and Rod’s pastor, that is also their choice. Some may find happiness that way. And its not business of yours to call that a sellout to bigotry.

(Or have I misjudged what you meant to say? I may have. IF so, please clarify.)

Good grief, Rod. You just know that everybody on the other side hates your side as people, and not your perspective? And someone who doesn’t “get” that is–I dunno, suffering from some kind of false consciousness? And you don’t think any socially conservative Christians at all actually hate the sinners as well as the sin? How is what you’re saying here any different from gays blanketly calling all Christians “haters”? Geez.

[NFR: Because I’m talking about this guy, not every liberal ever. — RD]

As Jefferson was a Deist of sorts, he would have believed in some variation of natural law thinking, however limited, and hence he accepted metaphysics. Now I’d argue that his God, his transcendent ground of Being, was quite small, so to speak. But he still had one.

“Why is that a problem in practice?”

It may not be. But the point is truth, not usefulness, or else you end up with ends justifying means, and no real standard by which to differentiate good means from bad ones, other than results.